Seven Must-Attend Events If You’re Going to SXSW

By

Jeff Yang

Mar 8, 2014 10:00 am ET

If you’ve ever been, you know that South by Southwest is a psychedelic triple-decker of pop-cultural happenings — a unique and staggeringly expansive event that brings the esoteric, alternative and obscure together with the hyped and headlined across the increasingly convergent worlds of music, film and technology. (Not to mention more recent and less high-profile categories like environmentalism and education.)

The best way to experience SXSWis to just do it — dive into the pool and go to whatever’s most interesting and closest: Not everything’s a masterpiece, but nearly everything’s worth doing, including hanging out in hotel lobbies and striking up conversations with fascinating random strangers.

But for first-timers in need of a map — or Twitter gawkers in search of hashtags worth following — here’s a set of seven must-dos (and seven backups in case of emergency):

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